TRENTON — Three years ago, the annual Thanksgiving Parade almost didn’t happen in the midst of the city’s financial woes. When word spread that the cash-strapped city might cancel the parade, volunteers pulled together to help trim the city’s costs.

Mercer County Freeholder Sam Frisby, the city’s former director of recreation, natural resources and culture, said a greater reliance on community groups to participate in the parade saved the city from having to pay bands and Mummers to march.

“It shifted to an all-community parade,” he said. “People started to realize that the city was serious about not being able to pay for it or do it all on our own.”

The parade signaled a shift toward fewer city-subsidized events in a time of tighter budgets, but there are still plenty of festivals, Frisby says, despite organizers of some parades and festivals moving or canceling their events.

In 2009, complaints about financial problems were a constant refrain among festival organizers, prompting them to cancel the Trenton Jazz Festival and scale back Heritage Days.

The Trenton Jazz Festival had run for 19 years, but the nonprofit committee suspended operations after struggling to find companies to contribute to the $250,000 budget.

That same summer, the 31-year-old Heritage Days festival was scaled down from two days to one, and last year, the worsening economy made even a small program impossible.

“Almost every festival that was out there, the city had a hand in some part or all of those festivals,” Frisby said, but the recession hit the city as well as the companies that once sponsored its festivals.

In the past, the city picked up the costs for the stages, the floats and overtime pay for police and the recreation department, whose staff set up and cleaned afterward, but most of those costs have since been passed on to volunteer organizations, Frisby said.

Candice Frederick, tourism marketing manager for Destination Trenton, said dwindling resources have hampered the city’s ability to run festivals.

“Festivals are not cheap to produce, but I think it’s great that the community is playing more of an active role to supplement and keep these things going,” she said, rattling off a list of ever-growing festivals, including Art All Night, Trenton Musicians Reunion, Graffiti Jam and Patriots’ Week. “They’re important for a city.”

Last weekend was the city’s first African-American Pride Festival, an event that drew throngs of residents for a day of food, music and dance.

Nevertheless, budgetary constraints and changing demographics have stalled the momentum of festivals and parades that were once fixtures in the city.

As the Chambersburg neighborhood saw its Italian-American community leave for the suburbs, its events drew far smaller crowds than decades ago.

The Feast of Lights was once a raucous street festival with fireworks, food vendors and rides in the park, along with the Mass and procession to honor Mary, the mother of Jesus. It’s now a thing of the past, as is the traditional Columbus Day parade.

Hamilton resident John Scarpati, who grew up in a large Italian family in Chambersburg, said the neighborhood’s festivals and parades changed with the influx of Hispanics.

“They didn’t understand what this Italian feast meant to people,” he said. “They came in, and wanted to change it.”

Scarpati, who now serves as president of the Mercer County Italian-American Festival Association, founded the festival of the same name after yearning for the bygone days when crowds attending the Feast of Lights used to line the streets.

In the late 1990s at his Sunday morning social gatherings, “the guys kept badgering me to actually start a new Feast of Lights out here,” he said.

Scarpati spent more than two years getting the festival off the ground, and the three-day Italian-American Festival, held in West Windsor, now draws thousands of people each year.

Support for the city’s annual Columbus Day parade also fizzled, prompting Scarpati to move the parade to Hamilton, where Italian-Americans make up the largest segment of the township population, he said.

The city’s annual St. Patrick’s Day parade followed suit when the original parade committee voted last year to move its festivities to Hamilton, but former members of that committee and city residents banded together to keep a separate parade in Trenton.

Though some city traditions have moved out of town and others, including the Puerto Rican Parade and the Hispanic parade, have fallen victim to budget woes, festival crowds continue to grow elsewhere in the county.

The Trenton Ancient Order of Hibernians’ Irish Music Festival is entering its 20th year in Hamilton, and West Windsor’s Mercer County Park now bursts with festivals, including the Freedom Festival, the Italian-American Festival and the Indo-American Festival, a two-day event that is being held this weekend.

Earlier this summer, the park hosted Sweet Sounds of Summer, a new jazz festival, and later this fall, there will be two new festivals: the Irish Festival and the Mercer County Cultural Festival.
“People are discovering a new jewel in Mercer County Park,” Frisby said. “People are saying, ‘We can use that land, but it doesn’t cost us an arm and a leg.’”

Freeholder John Cimino said the parking and the sprawling, scenic vistas draw people to the park.